Beyond Nimbyism: a multidisciplinary investigation of public engagement with renewable energy technologies
Funding
Research Councils Energy Programme, and managed by the Economic and Social Research Council.
Lead researchers
Principal Investigator: Dr. Patrick Devine-Wright.
Co-investigators: Dr. Hannah Devine-Wright, Prof. Gordon Walker, Dr. Julie Barnett, Dr. Kate Burningham, Prof. Bob Evans, Prof. David Infield and Prof. Andrew Wheatley
Research Partners
Our interdisciplinary research team encompasses researchers in psychology, geography, sociology, and planning and engineering, and is a collaboration of five universities: University of Manchester, Lancaster University, Loughborough University, Northumbria University, and University of Surrey.
Summary
The overarching conceptual aim of the project is to provide an integrated framework for understanding public engagement with diverse renewable energy technologies (RET) that encompasses technical and social science aspects; and to then use this framework to suggest how a constructive dialogue can be better facilitated between publics and other stakeholders about RET, in order to manage uncertainty in development and to inform the achievement of government targets.
Our work programme comprises five work packages (literature review, analysis of how publics are constructed by diverse stakeholders, construction of a provisional framework,
validating the framework in a series of case studies, and refining the framework) and involves a project advisory panel and practitioner workshops to ensure that perspectives from non-academic stakeholders are also reflected in the research programme.
Further information
For further information on the Beyond Nimbyism research project: